1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a recording and reproducing apparatus and a method thereof, and it is, for example, suitably applied to a recording and reproducing apparatus by using a disc media as a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various kinds of disc media such as Compact Disc (CD), Mini Disc (MD), Digital Versatile Disc (DVD), and a blue-ray disc (Blue-Ray Disc) (Registered Trademark of Sony Corporation) have been developed, and widely used as a recording medium such as an audio data, a video data and other computer data.
As the recording and reproducing apparatus corresponding to these disc media, there has been known a digital camera to record and reproduce an image file of an Exif format (Exchangeable Image File Format) generated based on the image of a still image captured by, for example, a Charge Coupled Device (CCD) camera.
Now, in the digital camera corresponding to such disc media, in case the recorded image files are to be reproduced as described above, usually it is, for example, by displaying in order the image files of the predetermined number of images from the image files newly captured in the display unit including a high resolution color liquid crystal display and the like that the reproduction is performed.
That is, the digital camera first performs seeking operations in order from the image files newly captured, thereby reading in order the image files from the disc media and recording the files in a buffer. After that, when the image files of the number of the images to be displayed in the display unit are stored in the buffer, the digital camera displays thumbnail images in the display unit based on the thumbnail image data of the stored image files.
However, in such a case, since the image files are sometimes discretely recorded in various positions in the disc media, the seek operation of each image file takes a lot of time, and as a result, there is a problem in that it takes a long time to allow the thumbnail image based on the thumbnail image data to be displayed in the display unit.
As a method of solving such a problem, apart from each image file, the thumbnail image data of each image file is lined up in order of the image files generated, so that the thumbnail image files including such thumbnail image data are generated, and these files are recorded in the disc media. Thus, there has been proposed a recording and reproducing apparatus (for example, see Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2004-5934) wherein, at the reproduction time, such thumbnail image files are read from the disc media, and the thumbnail images based on the thumbnail image files are allowed to be displayed in the display unit in newly captured order, so that an index display speed of the thumbnail image is quickened.